


Lack

by Geertrui



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Ambiguous prose, Freeform, M/M, angsty, jean also has issues dealing with this but you gotta read read to pick a lot of it all up, marco has post incident issues of an undisclosed kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:31:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geertrui/pseuds/Geertrui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he does voice his worries, Jean grumbles and says, "You <i>can</i> see," and grabs Marco's only hand and brings it to his face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lack

The world is a calleidoscope of colours and a spectrum of life. 

Mountains climb in the day, jagged and broken and looming, and burn in an explosion of rust and copper and bronze fire when the white-gold sun hits them in the evenings. Deserts sweep, rich like caramel and honey, shifting and rising and falling with the lungs of a microscopic life. Oceans are bottled green, and the sky is never the same colour, he tells him. Sometimes it's pink and purple, and this mango-orange that reminds Marco of indigo summer nights where he and Jean would lie under the expanding fleck of silver specks. 

It's a new city, though, with new things to experience. Things Marco won't experience. But it's okay, because Jean does that for him now. Only sometimes Marco gets worried because Jean tells him so much he might start to forget how he looks, replacing those essential memories with new ones of cicada-green jungles and the way the too-long grass behind the school ("Why weren't you in class, Jean?" met by mumbles) shimmers when the breeze passes through it.

But when he does voice his worries, Jean grumbles and says, "You _can_ see," and grabs Marco's only hand and brings it to his face. Marco laughs, in relief and something else that Jean thinks is forced but he says nothing, and Marco presses the pad of his thumb to the bow of Jean's lip; fingers tracing his eye sockets and high cheekbones and long jaw. He traces the crooked break in Jean's nose with the delicate sympathy of someone who sat in the hospital waiting room, and he smiles, genuinely, because _how_ could he forget. 

At the end of each day the nurses usher Jean out of the hospital, and Marco is left with the fading taste of Jean's vanilla chap on his lips and the decaying images of gaping, torn canyons and little dew creeks, full of ecosystem and sunspots; glittering, in silvers and whites and yellows with promises of cool relief from the burning orange grass that splinters under-foot. Sometimes, Marco gets angry, and he yells and cries and screams, and one time he causes such a disruption he is worried for and so moved to a clinic. Jean says it has a garden, and that it's full of snails and creepy-crawlies and ruby red lady bugs that all contrast picturesque against the lilies and lime grass. 

Marco is still angry, because Jean doesn't take him there when he asks. Instead, he asks how his physio is going and if he needs anything passed. Marco thinks to himself, _I have nurses for that_ , but doesn't say it. Because he's touched the rips and the gaping, torn canyons in his skin, and felt the swollen bubbles of his burn scars. His right arm had to be amputated. Marco swallows and reminds himself _it's a wonder he even stayed with you_ and for once he's glad he's blind because he doesn't want to know what he looks like.

The world is full of class systems and money and commercialism. Buildings climb high and meticulate and looming, and at night burst into an explosion of light and electricity that might be pretty if it wasn't caught in the perpetual sick-smog haze. The oceans are bottle filled. The sky is scarcely seen through the foliage of corporations and radio towers. Breezes rustling dry leaves can never be heard over the cacophony of cars and petrol and fumes that perpetuate, accumulate and kill. 

The clinic has a garden that is full of crackling straw grass and stagnant puddles in the punctured lawn. _But it's okay_ , Jean thinks sarcastically. As long as the nature-to-urbanisation ratio exists, not matter how inaccurate, unequal, it exists. It's something. And that something lacks for so many people. 

But Marco is Jean's something, his distraction from the too-similar death sky and expanse of tar. When Jean visits Marco, he shuts his eyes, and the nurses think it's because he can't bear to see the remnants of his friend (which, Jean hates to think, used to be true). Jean never considered it before, how the world spun on petrol and thrived on gas. He only realised when he had to see for Marco, who runs on false hope and forced food. 

Jean shuts his eyes when he he describes to Marco; spins tales of gold-spider webs, of an up graded world that in actuality, he'd rather be blind to, in the way that it is blind as it destroys.


End file.
